MOSCOW’S MAXIMUM security Lefortovo jail, where the KGB held its most important prisoners, has seen its share of revolutionaries, commissars, dissidents, ministers, oligarchs, governors and generals. Alexander Shestun is different.
Until his arrest in June, he was the head of the district of Serpukhov, an outlying city in the Moscow region. But he matters more than his job title suggests. His rise and fall give an insight into the mechanics of power in Russia and its lever—the Federal Security Service (FSB). Under President Vladimir Putin this has become even more dominant than the Soviet KGB he once served. Mr Shestun played a part in that transformation; he was also its casualty.
He acted as a “torpedo”—an undisclosed accomplice used by the FSB to blow up its rivals. There are dozens of such people. But Mr Shestun distinguishes himself by his habit of recording incriminating discussions and releasing excerpts on YouTube. His case is revealing because it is typical; it is exceptional because, at the moment of his downfall, when the FSB turned against him, he took the world with him into the room. This is his story.
Alexander Shestun made a name for himself in the 1990s as fearless—an otmorozhenny kommers: literally, a frostbitten businessman; idiomatically, a hard case. “I never paid protection money, never negotiated, always hit back,” he said in an interview not long before his arrest.
Frostbite is a useful attribute in Mr Putin’s Russia; indeed it is one the president himself embodies. To be willing to escalate above and beyond any acceptable level of risk is a powerful strategy.
Audacity, adventurism and charisma served Mr Shestun well in the lawless but opportunistic decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He became the richest man in his area. He also realised that to protect his wealth, he needed legitimacy. So in 2003 he turned himself from a tough, leather-jacketed, gold-chain-wearing kommers into an elected politician.
A mentor running an adjacent district told him to “imagine that the whole district, everything in it is yours: your schools, your kindergartens, your factories, your people, your money.”
Mr Shestun took his advice. What was good for Serpukhov, he reckoned, also had to be good for Shestun—and vice versa. His constituents, with whom he was broadly popular as a man who got things done, accepted this as the way of the world. He built roads, brought in investors, revamped a big park with hotels, horse riding, a spa and a landing strip for sport’s planes.
To stay in the game, he joined the Kremlin’s United Russia party, ensured that he won good results for Mr Putin in elections, and made deals with criminal bosses, the police, parts of the prosecutor general’s office and, most fatefully, the FSB.
But by 2017 the game had turned against him. Mr Shestun was feuding with a more powerful vassal, Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region in which Serpukhov sits. He was seeking to displace Mr Shestun as part of a broader plan to consolidate power.
Unlike the self-made Mr Shestun, who personified the wild capitalism of the 1990s, Mr Vorobyov stands for the crony capitalism that characterised the 2000s. Whatever his other talents, he had a pedigree and connections, and these were essential to his pursuit of money and power. His father was the right-hand man of Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister and one of Mr Putin’s closest and oldest allies; Mr Vorobyov calls him his “political godfather”. Gennady Timchenko, one of Mr Putin’s cronies, is an investor in the Vorobyov family’s fish firm. A member of the prosecutor general’s family works for Mr Vorobyov on a “voluntary basis”. Mr Vorobyov personifies the imbricated business and political networks that Mr Putin oversees.
For much of the 2000s so much money was sloshing around that men like Mr Shestun and Mr Vorobyov could both get rich. But as resources have become scarcer and appetites have grown, the conflicts between local lords have intensified.
Trying to defend his fief, Mr Shestun appealed for justice to Mr Putin, the tsar. On April 19th he uploaded to YouTube a plea to the president, along with extracts from recordings he made a year earlier. They include his conversation with Ivan Tkachev, a top FSB general who had been his handler and who is responsible for jailing some of the most powerful men in Russia, including regional governors, oligarchs, ministers and police generals.
The conversations took place between April 20th and May 2nd 2017. Mr Shestun says that he has released only a part of them. In one, by the entrance to the Office of the Presidential Administration, Mr Tkachev, using the familiar ty, is trying to get Mr Shestun to see reason. Mr Vorobyov has promised that, if Mr Shestun resigns as Serpukhov chief, a legal case against him will go away.
Mr Vorobyov, Mr Tkachev continues, has gone right up to the president. Mr Putin’s deputy chief of staff is personally involved. “Are you kidding! They will simply run you over with a steamroller,” Mr Tkachev says. “That is all. They will pull you in jail, anyway, and you will sit there for as long as they keep you there. You must understand this. Did you see how they steamrollered Surgrobov?”
